You might have heard of the recent TPB’s project named The Promo Bay already. The new service is meant to offer indie artists an opportunity to get featured on the main page of The Pirate Bay, which is undoubtedly an incredible chance to be seen and heard by the huge audience of the largest torrent tracker in the world. The service is absolutely legal, as the content creators upload their videos and links themselves, thus breaking the cover and giving permission to everyone to download their works.

The Pirate Bay is perfectly known by the world for being hunted. Now again, following a complaint filed by the Irish Recorded Music Association, the country’s High Court ordered a number of Irish broadband providers to prevent Internet users from accessing the torrent tracker within 1 month.

As you know, the infamous French “three-strikes” anti-piracy system was enforced four years ago and under it the authorities could suspend the broadband connection of repeat copyright infringers. So, the news is that the system doesn’t work anymore.

Both MasterCard and Visa have recently started taking action against VPN providers by refusing them card access. For instance, Swedish payment provider named Payson has cut access to various anonymizing services after being ordered to do so by the credit card companies.

South African broadband providers are bombarded with requests from rights holders to hand over personal details of ADSL customers who like downloading illegal material through BitTorrent file-sharing applications.

According to media reports, lots of the country’s Internet service providers were approached by the rights owners and asked to disclose personal data of their subscribers suspected of unauthorized file-sharing.

More than 3 years ago, Pandora started a program allowing to share people’s listening habits through Facebook. That is when Michigan filed a lawsuit against Pandora, saying that the company was infringing Michigan’s Video Rental Privacy Act and Michigan’s Consumer Act.

The Church of Scientology, known in Germany as a kind of sect exploiting vulnerable people for profit and based on the sci-fi novels of Ron Hubbard, was reported to have a crack at getting the search giant to censor bad press.

Scientologists pointed out that over the years their cyber-footprint is a bit off with the worldwide web full of negative publications about the cult. Today, Geir Isene, formerly a top level Scientologist turned whistleblower, has announced that the leaders of the Church met with Google’s Sergey Brin and asked him whether it were possible for Google to censor search results so that only positive posts about the Church would be returned on the query “Scientology”.

Well, a rational person would understand what the answer of Sergey Brin was like. Of course, Google’s founder couldn’t agree to do what the sect asked for, but the Scientologists weren’t discouraged and went as far as to try their luck meeting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – although the latter had regularly criticized the Church for its stands against online freedoms. Geir Isene begged the Church’s officials to give him a full day to explain the worldwide web to them before having the meeting. Nevertheless, the Electronic Frontier Foundation still put the Church of Scientology into its “Takedown Hall of Shame” which indicates that for a sci-fi based “religion” the latter experiences troubles understanding technology. In his book, titled “From Independent Scientologist to Just Me”, Geir Isene was telling how he tried his best to explain how the worldwide web works.

The Communications Data Bill was always referred to as a controversial one. The law enables police and security services to monitor online activity and email communications subject to a warrant being issued, while stopping shot of obtaining access to email content. The Bill was proposed last October, and the industry experts believe that its finalized version could be ready for the Queen’s Speech in May.

The Filesoup admin admitted that none of the system unit towers can boot up now, plus some tray doors were found broken off or missing at all. Besides, the site operator isn’t even sure if everything was returned,because he is still going through numerous trash bags filled with equipment.

An Oregon Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, believes that COICA can’t be considered the “right medicine” for tackling copyright infringement in the Internet. He therefore argued that the Bill, if not done correctly, can damage US innovation, US jobs, and a secure Internet.